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Abstract On May 28, 1794, a criminal investigation that had begun almost a month before concluded with the execution of sixty-three men and women, the imprisonment of fifteen more, and a few days later the destruction of an entire village. This article examines the burning of Bédoin, the crime that provoked it, and the judicial process that accompanied it, to explore the relationship between criminal cause and punitive effect during the Terror of year II. As a case study in revolutionary justice, this episode appears extreme, but this article argues that it allows us to interrogate the meanings that ordinary revolutionaries attached to terms like crime and complicity when the survival of the state seemed at stake. In looking beyond the Terror to the controversies that enveloped this village's destruction, this article also examines the aftermath of atrocity to consider how a society comes to terms with crime when both the definition of criminality and the identity of the criminal are in flux.
Joseph Clarke (Wed,) studied this question.